


it's all twisted

by BeStillMySlashyHeart



Series: same script, different lines [4]
Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Gen, M/M, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:22:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25807306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeStillMySlashyHeart/pseuds/BeStillMySlashyHeart
Summary: Andy fought herself free of the box, fought herself to the surface, then to the shore. She used her dreams to find them and in her anger kill them.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache the Scythian/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: same script, different lines [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1853176
Comments: 13
Kudos: 425





	it's all twisted

**Author's Note:**

> What if it was Andy in the coffin?

Joe thought for a moment, a single moment, after they woke up that Andy would get the new girl. It just seemed right. Or if Andy didn’t, then it should be Quynh.

He started sketching immediately, trying to commit the image from his dreams to paper before it slipped his mind. Nicky and Booker called out what they remembered and slowly an image began to take shape. 

Andy and Quynh were silent. Well, not silent. Joe chanced a look over at the two women, saw Andy clutching at her head and Quynh trying to soothe her, and looked away. 

“We will get her,” Nicky volunteered them. Joe didn’t object. Booker would be an awful choice to get the new girl and introduce her to their life and Quynh refused to leave Andy. And Andy wasn’t going anywhere.

“We will meet you at the Charlie safehouse?” Joe asked. They hadn’t decided where to go just yet but it was one of their more frequently used ones so he presumed it was where they were headed. 

“Hurry,” Quynh urged as they stood and gathered their things. “The military has a lot of scrutiny and it looked like she died in the line of duty. People will be watching her.” Andy let out a strangled noise and buried her face in her hands even more. Quynh rubbed a hand up and down her back and said something in a soft murmur in a language no one but the two of them even remembered. Neither of them so much as looked up as Joe and Nicky opened the door and jumped off the train.

\---

They were almost too late. The girl from their dreams was being escorted under armed guard to a plane when they first saw her. She looked uneasy, like she knew something was wrong but couldn’t quite place what it was. 

The situation wasn’t ideal, too many soldiers, too many weapons, too many eyes watching for it to be ideal, but they made it work. Joe got the girl and Nicky cleared their way. 

She waited until they got her away from the base before she asked any questions. “Who are you? Why did you kidnap me?” She paused. “Why do I know your faces?”

Joe and Nicky exchanged glances. They’d never had to do this before. Quynh had handled Booker’s introduction to this life and they’d just had to come in and deal with the aftermath. 

“What is your name?” Nicky asked first.

The girl looked between them and then seemed to consider her surroundings. She was sitting in the back of an armored vehicle, no restraints and no locks on the doors, and a weapon in her line of sight. Neither Joe nor Nicky had seen any reason to lock her up or take away her weapons. She had come peacefully enough, recognizing that they had taken her away from a potentially far more dangerous situation, that further action hadn’t been necessary. “Nile,” she replied.

Nicky turned in his seat to smile at her. “Hello Nile. It is nice to meet you. I’m Nicky. This is Joe. And we’re like you. We can’t die.”

\---

Quynh didn’t like this. She understood that Joe and Nicky had to go get the new girl from their dreams, she understood they couldn’t leave her exposed especially not in the military, and she understood that they had a responsibility to help her adjust to this life of theirs, but she didn’t like it. 

Andy had collapsed in on herself as soon as they’d awoken, mumbling nonsense in languages Quynh barely remembered. The few words she did make out were “no” and “not again” and “stop”. 

She let Booker lead the way to the safehouse, trusting him to keep an eye out for any dangers while she focused on Andy. There was something going on with him, she knew, but she didn’t have the time or patience to deal with it, not with Andy being Andy.

Booker left them as soon as they made it there. He saw them inside, made sure Quynh had a phone to reach him, and then left to get food and supplies. Quynh was half certain he just wanted to get away from the two of them but she wasn’t one to begrudge someone their privacy so she didn’t mention it. 

“Quynh,” Andy rasped once he was gone. Quynh was by her side in an instant. She laid one hand on her, her thumb rubbing slow circles, and Andy relaxed minutely. “I can’t take another one.”

“I know,” Quynh murmured.

“Why won’t it _end_?” She asked. She stepped out of Quynh’s grasp and banged around the kitchen for a minute, touching everything but doing nothing, before she collapsed into a chair. “How are we supposed to do this? How are we supposed to bring her into this life? This nightmare?”

Quynh pulled out a chair and sat down, reaching for Andy as she did. Andy leaned out of her reach though so Quynh let her hand drop onto the table, there if Andy needed it. “Andromache,” she said softly. Andy shook her head. “She is in it. She did not get a choice and neither did we. We will do this because we must, because the alternative is forcing her to do it by herself and we both know that we can’t do that. We were alone for far too long to ever do that to her.” Now Andy grabbed her hand and squeezed. Andy didn’t do well with being alone, didn’t like even a reminder of it. As much as she hated herself for it, for the weakness of it, she needed it. Needed Quynh. 

“I can’t do this,” Andy admitted. “I can’t-”

“Joe and Nicky are doing it,” Quynh reminded her. “They are finding her and they are telling her and you will not have to.”

Andy inhaled deeply and let out a slow breath. “How much longer are we going to do this Quynh? How much longer do I have to-” _live_.

“I don’t know,” Quynh told her honestly. “That’s not up to me.” If it was, she would have granted Andromache peace well before now. Maybe when Lykon died, maybe when the men ripped her from Quynh’s side, maybe when Andy spent centuries under the water, but definitely before now. Andy had lived too long and been through too much to be forced to continue living and yet she was.

No one had ever said immortality was kind but Quynh thought it reserved its cruelty for Andromache.

\---

Nile had no idea what to make of these people. The two men who had saved her from what she was certain was not going to be a pleasant fate with the MPs seemed nice enough, if a little odd. They’d dragged her to a small town outside of Paris, the two waxing lyrically about the city and the history and each other for the nearly ten hours it took to make the trip, and she was almost thankful to see other people. The three people who greeted her when they arrived at the old church gave her pause though. As almost overwhelming as Joe and Nicky had been, they were pleasant enough. They smiled and laughed and joked and set her nerves at ease. 

The two women sitting at the table and the man hunched in front of the TV did not. Misery and weariness seemed to emit from all of them. They greeted Nile with a smile and a nod, one woman actually said hello before dismissing her, and went back to what they were doing. 

They sat down to dinner not long after and Nile learned their names, Booker and Andy and Quynh, learned their ages, too old all around, and nothing else. 

The five people around her clearly knew each other well, had obviously spent years (centuries, her mind added) living out of each other’s pockets, and she was an outsider. An outsider who they seemed to think belonged with them but who they had no idea how to involve. Joe and Nicky tried. They steered the conversation away from memories and towards more modern topics, they asked Nile questions to get her speaking, but it was hard when the other three didn’t do much of anything. Booker was deep into his flask, reacting only when spoken to directly. Andy looked completely out of it while also being hyper aware of her surroundings, simultaneously on edge and uncaring about it. Quynh was too focused on Andy to really pay much attention to the others. She masked it slightly, occasionally pretended that she was doing anything other than watching the other woman, but even then she didn’t try too hard to engage with Nile.

The dinner ended, Andy and Quynh cleared the table, and Nile fled. She needed to fresh air in more ways than one.

“Nile.” She startled when Joe came up next to her. “Sorry,” he apologized immediately. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s fine,” she waved him off. “Is something wrong?”

He smiled. “I was going to ask you that.”

Nile shrugged. “I’m fine.”

“It’s alright if you aren’t,” he told her. “It’s a lot to process.”

“It is,” Nile nodded. She flipped her phone around in her hands and turned the screen on to stare down at her mom and her brother. “I want to go home,” she laughed in surprise. She’d never been one to get homesick but right now...

“I would not advise that,” Joe told her. Nile stiffened. “Booker did that,” he added. The pieces clicked together. Booker’s dead eyes, his seemingly unending flask. “We will not stop you, of course,” Joe told her. “We just would not advise it.”

“What happened to them?” Nile gestured to the church behind them. “Will I be like that one day?” They were miserable. The only ones who weren’t were Joe and Nicky and she had an inkling it had to do with them being Joe-and-Nicky rather than being more well adjusted than the others.

Joe looked at the church, his eyes saddening as his gaze lingered. “We are old, Nile. All of us. Booker- Booker had to watch his family die. Andy and Quynh are very very old and they have been through a lot.”

There was something else though. Something in the way Andy didn’t look at her. “What else?”

“Andy was captured, about five centuries ago,” Joe confessed after a while. “She was locked up and cast into the sea.” Nile’s breath caught in her throat.

“How long did it take for you to find her?”

Joe shook his head. “We didn’t. She found us.” Nile’s brow furrowed. “We searched. We searched for decades but the technology just didn’t exist for us to find her and we had to stop. Her cage rusted and she was able to break free herself but it took a while.”

“How long?”

“She found us about,” Joe paused to think, “fifteen years ago? She used her dreams of Booker to find us once she’d made it to land.”

Nile’s mind whirred. “You’re telling me she spent almost 500 years trapped in a cage under water?”

“Not being able to die is not always a good thing, Nile,” Joe replied. Nile hadn’t yet thought of it as a good thing so this wasn’t quite the revelation Joe acted like it should be.

“Is there any way to stop it?”

Joe shook his head. “Our time will come one day,” he confessed. “But we don’t know when and we have no control over it. One day we just won’t heal any more.”

\---

Booker had never seen Andy like this. In the last decade and a half, he’d never really seen her as anything other than severely depressed. They’d commiserated over it more than a couple of times.

This, this wasn’t that.

Andy _raged_. 

He’d expected Joe to be angry, expected the man to fight and yell once Booker confessed. After Nicky was taken, he’d half dreaded the moment Joe realized Booker’s hand in it. 

He hadn’t expected Andy.

Andy killed him four times before Joe even got a hit in. Each time more painful than the last. She barely waited for him to take a breath before she killed him again.

“Where are they?” She asked, her voice a low growl. When Booker didn’t answer quickly enough, she killed him again. “Where are they?”

“London,” Booker forced out before she could swing at him again. “They’re in London.” Andy stepped back and let Joe step in. He hauled Booker to his feet and stared him in the eyes.

“You will help us get them back.” It wasn’t a request. “And then we will deal with you.”

Joe’s fury burned colder than Booker had expected but it was no less intense. He nodded and let Joe push him into action.

“I thought you’d be happy,” he told Andy. “They want to know what makes us like this. If they find out, they can undo it. We can finally die, Andromache.”

Andy hit up across the face with the broad side of her axe. “You would have us be prisoners,” she corrected. “You would lock us up and have them kill us over and over again.”

“So that we can finally _die_!” Booker yelled. “Don’t you want it to be over? Don’t you want some goddamn _peace_?!”

Andy shook her head. “Not like this. And not for them. We will get Quynh and Nicky out and you will help us. And no one will ever lock me up again.”

\---

Andy didn’t notice it at first, too focused on getting to Quynh and Nicky and getting them out. The pain and the blood was normal. She didn’t notice when it didn’t go away.

It was Quynh who saw. They’d gotten out of the lab, killed everyone who might come after them, and gotten somewhere safe. Joe and Nicky had escaped to a room. Booker and Nile had left to get food and other supplies.

It was just Andy and Quynh. As it should be. As it had been. 

Andy spent centuries angry at Quynh. She’d been angry at Joe and Nicky too but her anger at Quynh was different. Not for a single moment had she thought Quynh would give up on her. She fought in that box and _knew_ that Quynh was looking for her.

Right up until Booker died and she saw Quynh in his eyes and knew that she had.

Andy fought herself free of the box, fought herself to the surface, then to the shore. She used her dreams to find them and in her anger kill them.

But even as she raged at them for leaving her, she’d needed them. She’d needed Quynh. Because they weren’t meant to be alone and Andy had been alone for far, far too long. 

“Andromache,” Quynh breathed, tearing her from her thoughts. Andy turned to see Quynh staring at her.

“What?” She asked.

Quynh stepped in close, her hand going to Andy’s stomach. Andy didn’t stop her. 

The pain was a surprise. Quynh pressed against one of the bloodstains on Andy’s shirt and Andy felt a sharp pain in her gut. Quynh pulled her hand away and it was stained with blood. Wet, fresh blood.

It had been almost an hour since they left the lab. Andy should have healed long ago, the stain on her shirt well on its way to dry by now.

“Andromache,” Quynh said again. There was a strange note to her voice, like she couldn’t decide if she was happy or sad at the new revelation. Andy didn’t see the look on her face, her eyes fixed on her own stomach as she rucked up her shirt to stare at the wound. 

It was bleeding.

It was _bleeding_.


End file.
